The Potty-Training Diaries; Or, The Rules of War; or, Rules Were Made to Be Broken

Rule 1: Do not pressure the child about potty training; avoid creating anxiety.

Allison Clare has been using the potty occasionally since she was about 11 months old, but always on her own terms. Sometimes, weeks passed and she was uninterested in using the potty, and other times, she'd voluntarily use it several times a day. Far from being anxious about the potty, she felt cheerfully free to disregard it.

Rule 2: The child will let you know when she is ready to use the potty.

Weeks, months passed. AC showed no signs of being more ready. I tried incentivizing her with mini M&Ms or mini marshmallows. I tried purchasing special Elmo underpants. I tried repeated viewings of Elmo's Potty Time, which she adored and learned by heart but which had no motivating effect.

On the contrary, she decided she preferred diapers and told us so ("No use potty. Wear diapers."). At that point, Sam and I decided that she--and maybe more important, we--were ready. We came back from our post-semester travels, took a deep breath, and began potty training after her nap one day about a week ago at about 4:15.

By the time she got into the bathtub at 7:30 that night, I wanted to die some dramatic, inexplicable, psychosomatic nineteenth-century death (that would induce remorse in those left behind). I had imagined that she would have frequent accidents--like maybe one every hour or two. I had not imagined that she would have five accidents in three hours, including one that resulted in my leaving her crying baby sister in the living room while I scooped her up, little marbles falling out of her underpants as I raced with her to the upstairs potty, then laid her down in the bathroom, yelled "stay there," ran to retrieve the baby, put the baby down in her own room, cleaned up the big sister, cleaned up the rest of the house enough that AC could be released from quarantine, and then consoled my poor sweet newborn.

Rule 3: Do Not Make a Big Deal About Accidents.

What was terribly demoralizing about it all was that she didn't seem to care at all. In fact, the way I realized she'd had some of her accidents that first afternoon was that she would continue happily on her way, but walking like a little sailor with her feet wide apart because her pants were wet. I was really questioning whether we needed to somehow begin stigmatizing the "accidents," since she seemed so entirely untroubled by the whole process. Until now, there had been nothing in parenting--not AC's colicky early months, nor the midnight run(s) to Children's Hospital, nor even Gillian's recent projectile vomiting illness--that I had not wanted to be present for. I wanted to be the one to take care of them, to be there to calm them and clean them up and make everything right.

Until this, which I sincerely and to the bottom of my heart wished I could outsource. Wasn't there some . . . camp . . . that I could send her to? I could hardly face the next day.

But, magically, she seemed to get it the very next morning (day 2). Now we are a week into it, and she has little minor leaks sometimes, and one big accident when I was feeding Gillian and couldn't help AC get to the potty when she told me she needed to go. She is usually dry after her naps. And everyone gets potty trained eventually . . . right? It hasn't been so bad--like I hear about waging other kinds of war, it is long stretches of boredom punctuated by panic.